Imagine a world where diagnosing food allergies is precise, fast, and accessible to everyone. 

That future isn’t far off thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). With its unmatched ability to process and analyze vast amounts of data in seconds, AI is set to transform how we diagnose and manage food allergies.

As a practicing allergist with over 30 years of experience, here’s how I see AI changing the game, what’s coming next, and how this technology will improve lives.

How AI is Already Making a Difference

At institutions like St. Francis, AI is used to streamline patient histories, a crucial step in allergy diagnostics.

Physicians can record patient conversations with applications like Epic or Haiku, and AI-powered tools summarize these interactions into comprehensive reports. This rapidly speeds up documentation and minimizes errors that occur when juggling 20 to 25 patients daily (which is a normal caseload).

With these transcripts, physicians can also reread what their patients tell them, which can be critical for giving them the proper treatment. 

But AI’s role doesn’t stop at documentation—it’s also helping with pattern recognition. 

For example, natural language processing (NLP) tools can mine clinical notes to uncover trends in symptoms and correlate them with potential allergens, creating a foundation for more targeted care.

AI’s Future Impact on Food Allergy Diagnostics

Diagnosing food allergies today is a time-intensive and often risky process.

Oral food challenges—the gold standard for diagnosis—require patients to ingest small amounts of suspected allergens under medical supervision. This approach comes with inherent risks, including severe allergic reactions like Anaphylaxis. On top of that, traditional skin and blood tests frequently produce false positives, making you think you have a food allergy when you don’t.

That’s where AI can come in.

By analyzing vast amounts of patient data—including symptoms, food diaries, and test results—AI can identify patterns that are nearly impossible for humans to detect. For instance, instead of relying solely on oral challenges, AI might flag correlations between a patient’s symptoms and specific foods within the critical 30-minute to 1-hour window after ingestion. 

Recent studies back this up: machine learning (ML) models trained on clinical data, such as IgE levels and skin prick test results, have already achieved predictive accuracies exceeding 80% for specific food allergies. 

This level of precision helps refine diagnostics while reducing the need for invasive testing.

What’s Next? The Integration of AI into Allergy Care Plans

The next big step is incorporating AI into personalized care plans.

With heavy caseloads, doctors can’t do a literature search for every patient that comes in. There’s simply not enough time.

But with AI, we could. When physicians assess patient symptoms and form plans for them, they could have AI access hospital data and perform real-time literature searches to recommend cutting-edge therapies and ensure nothing critical is overlooked. 

For example, ML models have already demonstrated the ability to predict treatment responses in conditions like atopic dermatitis. Similar AI-driven predictions could identify which patients with food allergies are likely to succeed in oral immunotherapy (OIT), guiding treatment decisions with confidence.

Doctors, who often face “brain drain” from processing mountains of information, stand to benefit enormously from this. AI could also automatically generate a checklist of steps to follow for each patient, minimizing the risk of missed diagnoses or treatments.

Addressing the Shortage of Healthcare Providers

The number one problem in healthcare today is a shortage of doctors.

Emergency rooms are overwhelmed, with patients waiting hours—sometimes days—for care. And doctors are getting burned out from the intense patient loads and long hours.

AI can help bridge this gap.

By empowering mid-level providers like nurses and physician assistants with AI tools, these professionals can handle routine screenings, initial assessments, and make more sophisticated diagnoses. This reduces the caseload on doctors, allowing them to focus on complex cases.

For instance, a nurse equipped with AI could quickly determine whether a patient’s symptoms warrant further testing or immediate intervention, streamlining the entire process. 

In allergy care, AI could enable nurses to review patient histories and flag potential allergens with high accuracy, providing a strong starting point for the physician’s evaluation.

How AI Will Prevent Errors

Human error in medicine is a significant concern and fairly common.

Whether it’s a misdiagnosis or a missed step in treatment, the consequences can be severe. AI minimizes this risk by acting as a second set of eyes, enhancing what the doctor already does. It identifies potential errors in real time, giving doctors the chance to correct them before they affect the patient.

For example, if an AI system notices a mismatch between a patient’s symptoms and their prescribed treatment, it can flag the issue immediately. Doctors then have the opportunity to review and adjust the plan.

Don’t get me wrong, AI can make errors too.

But most of the time I have found them pretty easy to find with my medical knowledge and careful review of AI documentation. It will be even easier for doctors to catch errors when having less brain drain, making for more precise assessments and plans.

And for the record, AI isn’t replacing doctors—it’s making them better. Once everyone sees the extraordinary benefit of doctors using AI, it will only increase the demand for more of them.

AI’s Broader Impact on Healthcare

Soon, doctors across all specialties will use AI every day, for every patient. 

Specific AI tools for assessment and plans are already in the works for allergy, and will likely be here in the next year or two. With AI being trained on every disease, it will also soon help emergency rooms, like with AI analyzing chest pain symptoms in an ER and prioritizing cases based on the likelihood of heart or lung issues. 

These advancements make healthcare more efficient and accessible.

Here’s how you can prepare for the future of healthcare:

If you’re a patient, keep an open mind about how technology can improve your care. Ask your doctor if AI tools are being used in your diagnosis or treatment plan. If they’re not, it might be worth exploring healthcare providers who are adopting this cutting-edge technology.

For healthcare professionals, now is the time to familiarize yourself with AI tools. Start integrating them into your workflow to see firsthand how they can save time and improve patient outcomes.

The time to embrace AI is now. The tools are here, and the potential is limitless. 

Let’s get to work.

(p.s., if you have questions about food allergies or need expert care, reach out to me here)